MAPPING CIVIL SOCIETY ACTORS IN SYRIA

Project Background

Since June 2015, CfS has been working on the ground inside Syria to collect in-depth information about civil society organizations and projects in Syria, especially those which started after the uprising in 2011. The collected information is used as a resource for actors working on Syria and can be utilized for activities such as reporting, evaluation, research and analysis, as well as a networking tool that connect local actors on the ground to partners abroad.

In order to have a comprehensive view of the complex situation on the ground, CfS started collecting firsthand information about the current and past status of organizations, including active individuals, turning points, needs and their projects, based on Organization Capacity Assessment (OCA) forms filled in direct interviews with organizations and a strict methodology of verification. The field team of CfS operates in all Syrian regions and the four neighbor countries.

This information will be hosted on our internal servers and access will be granted to partners each on their respective domain of interest.

Phase I and II

By mid-September 2015, CfS published a report of its primary findings about 802 organizations and expanded its online presence on known activist groups and beyond

Data was made available to stakeholders worldwide with special data visualization techniques on the website

The second phase is undergoing now, more than 75% of organizations inside Syria were interviewed with a high response rate, the 42 field officers and 5 supervisors are working on a daily basis and finish the data collection in March 2016, where the data analysis and report will be ready in September- October.

Updates

Once the report on the second phase is published, the methodology and tool will be reviewed and evaluated, and the field team will engage in a second round of interviews of capacity assessment to keep the database fresh and up-to-date, significant changes will be introduced in the online platform which will allow donors to access profiles of their current or potential partners, and also for single organizations to review their profile.

Online Platform and access roles

Since this information are highly sensitive and could put many people in danger we started developing our own platform to host and manage the data securely with specific access roles so we provide only necessary information to those who need it.